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Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul victory spells a tragic, disastrous defeat for Israel

Netanyahu’s judicial overhaul victory spells a tragic, disastrous defeat for Israel

David Horovitz writes: Shortly before 4 p.m. on Monday, July 24, 2023, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition voted to approve the so-called “reasonableness” law — the first part of its plan to politicize and radically constrain Israel’s hitherto independent judiciary — and thus set in motion a process that risks tearing apart the State of Israel. The legislation was spearheaded by Likud Justice Minister Yariv Levin, and steered through its committee stages by far-right Religious Zionism Knesset member Simcha Rothman….

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Nearly a third of Republicans now view Trump as ‘unfavorable,’ Pew poll

Nearly a third of Republicans now view Trump as ‘unfavorable,’ Pew poll

Insider reports: Former President Donald Trump’s becoming more and more unfavorable amongst Republicans as the 2024 presidential election approaches, according to a recent Pew Research poll. According to the poll, conducted between July 10 and 16, the share of Republican and Republican-leaning independents who view the former president as “unfavorable” has risen from 24% in 2022 to 32% in 2023. The poll also found that Trump’s “favorable” rating amongst Republican and Republican-leaning independents has decreased over the past year, going…

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‘This is barbarism’: Shock at Russian strike on Odesa cathedral

‘This is barbarism’: Shock at Russian strike on Odesa cathedral

The Guardian reports: ‘Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy.” The priest dabbed tears from his eyes as his sonorous voice emerged from loudspeakers hastily assembled outside his devastated cathedral, the incantation competing with the crash of debris being loaded into trucks and the drilling of repair works on neighbouring buildings. This was the second time that the vast, sand-yellow Transfiguration Cathedral, which sits in the heart of Odesa’s Unesco-listed historic centre, had been attacked: in the 1930s,…

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Putin tightens grip on Africa after killing Black Sea grain deal

Putin tightens grip on Africa after killing Black Sea grain deal

Politico reports: African leaders have long been reluctant to criticize Russia and now that President Vladimir Putin has killed off a deal to allow Ukraine to export grain, they know they are more dependent than ever on Moscow’s largesse to feed millions of people at risk of going hungry. Having canceled the pact on Monday, Moscow unleashed four nights of attacks on the Ukrainian ports of Odesa and Chornomorsk — two vital export facilities — damaging the infrastructure of global…

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In judicial overhaul protests, Israel’s soldiers face off against Netanyahu

In judicial overhaul protests, Israel’s soldiers face off against Netanyahu

The Washington Post reports: Israel’s year of chaos neared a crescendo Sunday as thousands of military pilots and soldiers threatened not to report for volunteer duty if the far-right government refuses back down from a planned vote on limiting the power of the Supreme Court. Tens of thousands of citizens filled the streets, some spending their sixth night outdoors, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was rushed to the hospital for an emergency cardiac procedure. The 73-year-old premier was still hospitalized…

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Liberal suburbs have their own border wall

Liberal suburbs have their own border wall

Richard D. Kahlenberg writes: The New York City suburb of Scarsdale, located in Westchester County, New York, is one of the country’s wealthiest communities, and its residents are reliably liberal. In 2020, three-quarters of Scarsdale voters cast ballots for Joe Biden over Donald Trump. One can safely presume that few Scarsdale residents are ardent backers of Trump’s wall on the Mexican border. But many of them support a less visible kind of wall, erected by zoning regulations that ban multifamily…

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Who benefited from slavery?

Who benefited from slavery?

The Washington Post reports: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is intensifying his efforts to de-emphasize racism in his state’s public school curriculum by arguing that some Black people benefited from being enslaved and defending his state’s new African American history standards that civil rights leaders and scholars say misrepresents centuries of U.S. reality. “They’re probably going to show that some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life,” DeSantis said on Friday…

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We must not forget what happened to the world’s indigenous children

We must not forget what happened to the world’s indigenous children

Steve Minton writes: Between 1890 and 1978, at Kamloops Indian Residential School in the Canadian province of British Columbia, thousands of Indigenous children were taught to ‘forget’. Separated from their families, these children were compelled to forget their languages, their identities and their cultures. Through separation and forgetting, settler governments and teachers believed they were not only helping Indigenous children, but the nation itself. Canada would make progress, settlers hoped, if Indigenous children could just be made more like white…

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Before Jan. 6, Mark Meadows joked about Trump’s election claims

Before Jan. 6, Mark Meadows joked about Trump’s election claims

The Washington Post reports: Mark Meadows joked about the baseless claim that large numbers of votes were fraudulently cast in the names of dead people in the days before the then-White House chief of staff participated in a phone call in which then-President Trump alleged there were close to 5,000 dead voters in Georgia and urged Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to overturn the 2020 election there. In a text message that has been scrutinized by federal prosecutors, Meadows wrote…

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Inside Biden’s unusual decentralized campaign

Inside Biden’s unusual decentralized campaign

The Washington Post reports: President Biden’s campaign manager, Julie Chavez Rodriguez, has spent her first months on the job planning a sweeping national reelection effort by squatting in a borrowed office overlooking an Amtrak commuter line on Capitol Hill. With just three other paid staffers, her entire operation cost $1.4 million from April through June — about an eighth of what President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign spent in the same period in 2011, when it operated out of an imposing…

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Is this the end of Netanyahu?

Is this the end of Netanyahu?

David Remnick writes: Benjamin Netanyahu has been Prime Minister of Israel longer than anyone in the history of the state, longer than F.D.R. was President of the United States. And yet, for all his electoral success, he has always been a known quantity. Twenty-five years ago, during Netanyahu’s first term, I spoke with his predecessor and fellow Likud member Yitzhak Shamir. “Bibi?” Shamir said. “He is not a very trustworthy man.” He added, “I don’t believe he believes in anything….

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Pro-war Russian blogger and former spy, Igor Girkin, who called Putin a ‘lowlife’ arrested in Moscow

Pro-war Russian blogger and former spy, Igor Girkin, who called Putin a ‘lowlife’ arrested in Moscow

CNN reports: A prominent Russian pro-war blogger who has criticized President Vladimir Putin and his military’s mishaps in Ukraine was arrested on Friday, in a move that suggested the Kremlin’s patience with dissent has grown thinner in the wake of the Wagner mercenary rebellion last month. Igor Girkin, a former KGB officer who helped Russia seize Crimea and was convicted of mass murder for his role in the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in eastern Ukraine, was taken from…

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How college towns across America are decimating the GOP

How college towns across America are decimating the GOP

Politico reports: Spring elections in Wisconsin are typically low turnout affairs, but in April, with the nation watching the state’s bitterly contested Supreme Court race, voters turned out in record-breaking numbers. No place was more energized to vote than Dane County, the state’s second-most populous county after Milwaukee. It’s long been a progressive stronghold thanks to the double influence of Madison, the state capital, and the University of Wisconsin, but this was something else. Turnout in Dane was higher than…

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Fulton county prosecutors prepare racketeering charges in Trump inquiry

Fulton county prosecutors prepare racketeering charges in Trump inquiry

The Guardian reports: The Fulton county district attorney investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in the state of Georgia has developed evidence to charge a sprawling racketeering indictment next month, according to two people briefed on the matter. The racketeering statute in Georgia requires prosecutors to show the existence of an “enterprise” – and a pattern of racketeering activity that is predicated on at least two “qualifying” crimes. In the Trump investigation, the Fulton county district…

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Texas’s governor put a barrier in the Rio Grande. DOJ just hit back

Texas’s governor put a barrier in the Rio Grande. DOJ just hit back

Greg Sargent writes: One of the more pernicious developments in our politics is the effort by red-state governors to assert outsize power over immigration in their states, in ways designed to appeal to national right-wing audiences. For instance, the state of Texas recently placed a large barrier in the Rio Grande, supposedly to keep migrants out, but actually just to send a message to Fox News viewers that the state is securing the border where President Biden allegedly refused. But…

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Rogue state: Alabama Republicans refuse to draw a second Black congressional district in defiance of Supreme Court

Rogue state: Alabama Republicans refuse to draw a second Black congressional district in defiance of Supreme Court

NBC News reports: Alabama Republicans on Friday defied a U.S. Supreme Court order by passing a new congressional map that includes only one majority-Black district. The GOP-controlled Legislature had called a special session to redraw an earlier map after the Supreme Court reaffirmed a federal court order to include two districts where Black voters make up voting-age majorities, “or something quite close to it.” But on Friday, state Republicans approved a new map with just one majority-Black seat and a…

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